May 2011 Archives

Our choice for our children- Two lives or one?

(This is excerpted from Digital Community, Digital Citizen, by Jason Ohler, published by Corwin Press, 2010)

We have a fundamental question to address with regards to educating our Digital Age children. How we answer this question will determine how we plan for and implement education in the broadest sense for many years to come. In its simplest form, the question is, Should we consider students to have two lives or one?

Allow me to restate this question with a bit more detail: Should we consider students to have two separate lives--a relatively digital free life at school and a digitally saturated life away from school--or should we consider them to have one life that integrates their lives as students and digital citizens?

The "two lives" perspective contends that our students should live a traditional educational life at school, much like their parents did, and a second, digital life outside school. It says that the technology that kids use is too expensive, problematic, or distracting to integrate into teaching and learning. It says that issues concerning the personal, social, and environmental impacts of living a digital, technological lifestyle are tangential to a school curriculum. Above all, it says that kids will have to figure out how to navigate the digital world beyond school on their own and puzzle through issues of cyber safety, technological responsibility, and digital citizenship without the help of the educational system.

On the other hand, the one life perspective says it is time to help students blend their two lives into an integrated, meaningful approach to living in the digital age. It says that if schools don't make it their primary mission to help students understand not only how to use technology but also when and why, then we have no right to expect our children to grow up to be the citizens we want them to be and that the world needs them to be. It says that if we don't help our digital kids balance personal empowerment with a sense of community responsibility, then future generations will inherit a world that does not represent anyone's dream of what is best for humanity. It says that if we don't understand that schools are exactly the place for kids to learn how to use technology not only effectively and creatively but also responsibly and wisely, then heaven help us all.

Dr. Jason Ohler is a professor emeritus, speaker, writer, teacher, researcher and lifelong digital humanist. Read more at jasonOhler.com.

Greening a Digital Media Course

I've been a media literacy educator for a dozen years, although as a consequence of participating in the punk movement during the early '80s, I've been a lifelong proponent of do-it-yourself media. Since entering the field of education I've worked in numerous arts programs with youths, spending considerable time with disadvantaged groups. Working with Native Americans, Latinos and Afro-Caribbean youth has helped me to formulate a multicultural, multi-perspective approach to media literacy that has pushed me to reconceptualize cultural assumptions embedded in traditional media education.* Learners in those communities are under greater stress than mainstream Americans, and their particular needs call for attention to social justice, environmental issues and cultural citizenship, things that many privileged Americans take for granted.

At one point when I was working on the rez, a Native American elder opined on the information highway by remarking, "any road can get you somewhere." Unfortunately, many programs that embrace digital media tools are too enamored with the technology to think more critically about the "somewhere" we are moving towards. It was during this period that I realized the importance of appropriate applications of technology and also understood the ethnocentrism embedded in the idea of "progress." More importantly, I was forced to think more carefully about who or what I was ultimately serving in my work as an educator.

As a fellow media geek it might surprise you, then, to suggest that my approach since then has been to serve the planet: humans and nonhuman alike. In particular I feel a strong calling to speak to the best of my abilities on behalf of our silent partner: nature. These days in my current role as a professor of media studies at an American University in Rome, I have taken to heart the task of incorporating lessons I learned beyond the walled garden of academia to green the field of media studies. What follows, then, is a field report from my most recent effort, which was to green a digital media culture course.